There are 28 Arab neighborhoods and villages that fall within Jerusalem’s municipality with as many as 350,000 residents, most of whom identify as Palestinian.

They align themselves with the Palestinian cause, yet don’t live under the Palestinian Authority.

Omari says that the community he serves is of two minds. They are entitled to social benefits, health insurance, allowances for children and the elderly, but their Jerusalem residency status is always under threat of being taken away if it’s shown that they no longer live in Jerusalem. This push and pull – being part, but not wholly, of Israel – creates paranoia when dealing with the civil administration. Problems are solved in the traditional sense, between the family and community, and if necessary, through a conduit who has good relations with the government.

“The whole climate of these problems can make people suspicious about anything that can be done for them,” Omari says. “They address me, not the municipality; I contact the municipality.”

According to a 2015 survey by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 75.4 percent of east Jerusalem Palestinians live below the poverty line, 83.9% of whom are children; the school dropout rate was 26% for 11th grade and 33% in 12th grade.

In a 2013 report by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, the authors wrote that “all of the Arab neighborhoods were classified in the low socioeconomic group” and that “the extent of poverty within the non-Jewish population of Jerusalem was significantly higher than within the Jewish population.”

Read more: http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Between-two-worlds-455839

High drop-out rate predisposes to low-paying jobs.

Moreover, of the 75% in poverty, 84% are under 18. Now, if the kids are in poverty their parents certainly are. So if I have 1000 Palestinians chosen randomly I'm going to find 160 adults and 840 kids? That argues for either a skewed fertility rate for poor Arabs in Jerusalem or something else is going on.

Still, it's a truism that the easiest way for a low-income worker to fall under the poverty line is to have another child. In most countries these days, it's low income families that go on to have the largest number of children, on average, so that heart-wrenching disproportionately large number of kids in poverty is not going away. It's not a free-standing fact caused simply by family-external factors and while the inconvenience of finding child-care may lower incomes, that's a knock-on effect of having more kids. Whatever a 16-year-old has internalized is largely predictive of both family size and income, before either is actually realized. (Apparently Jewish fertility is a tad higher in Jerusalem than Arab, but I'm not sure that this violates that general rule. A lot of ultra-orthodox are not what one would call wealthy.)

in the South during the Jim Crow era.

In both cases the low socioeconomic status was enforced from above as a system of discrimination. Actually, the Arabs probably have it worse, as they don't have civil rights, which means that they can't do sit-ins or demonstrate for their constitutional rights. At least black people were allowed to be judged in the same courts as whites, the kangaroo part being prejudice and unfair interpretations of law.

I think that the comparison with ultra-orthodox is false - they're not oppressed by Apartheid or unfair application of the law.